Remy’s mouth twitched. Yeah, New Orleans had that kind of effect on people.
Gage Dixon, their boss, pack alpha, and commander of the Dallas SWAT team, had sent the four of them to New Orleans to cross-train with the local tactical unit, the city’s term for their SWAT teams. At the same time, four officers from NOPD SWAT would take part in a weeklong exercise in Dallas. While Gage and the guy who ran NOPD SWAT had become friends when they worked together in Dallas years ago, they still had to handle the whole thing carefully, both here and in Texas. Cross-training with cops who weren’t werewolves meant hiding their abilities, so Gage had made his expectations extremely clear.
“Don’t run too fast, lift anything you shouldn’t be able to, or let your tempers get away from you, and whatever you do, no claws, fangs, or frigging glowing eyes,” Gage had reminded them before they’d left.
A year ago, Gage would never have considered letting them do something like this, but he and the Pack had changed a lot since then. Not only were they better at controlling their abilities, but they were also a lot more trusting of the outside world now. Having so many guys find their soul mates recently probably had a lot to do with that.
“Is it always this wild here?” Zane asked as a group of attractive women passing by gave them long, lingering looks and dazzling smiles.
Remy chuckled. He wondered if Zane knew his British accent was always more noticeable when he was around the opposite sex. Probably. No doubt the former soldier from the British Special Air Service knew it made women go crazy.
“Yeah, it’s always like this here,” Remy confirmed. “New Orleans is a city that takes the concept of having a good time to a whole different level.”
There was also a palpable tension in the air tonight that had absolutely nothing to do with the normal wild-party atmosphere of the city—the tropical storm brewing in the Gulf. While his teammates had probably picked up on the nervous energy percolating around them, they most likely didn’t know the cause. But Remy knew from growing up here and living through Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Not that anyone was comparing Tropical Storm Ophelia with Katrina. It was a much smaller, weaker storm than Katrina had ever been, and if the talking heads on the Weather Channel were to be believed, the storm was destined to disintegrate into a tropical depression and do nothing more than drench the Texas coast with a couple inches of rain. That sucked for places like Houston, which had gotten more than its fair share of rain lately, but was a serious blessing for New Orleans.
Even with everyone saying Ophelia wasn’t going to be a repeat of Katrina, and that the levees, floodgates, and canals protecting the city would be fine, there was still an underlying current of fear in the city. Some of it was because many of the same people saying Ophelia wasn’t a threat were also the ones who’d said there was almost no chance Katrina would hit the city. People might have forgiven those weather experts, but no one had forgotten.
The thing that really had the city walking around on proverbial eggshells at the moment was the fact that Katrina had forced everyone to accept how vulnerable the delta city was to almost any kind of storm. New Orleans was a unique city because it was essentially an island surrounded by large lakes to the north and east, the Mississippi to the south, and wetlands to the west. Even worse, most of the city was below sea level. In fact, parts of it, like the infamous Lower Ninth Ward, were three or four feet below the water surrounding New Orleans.
Despite knowing another big storm could drown the city again, maybe worse than the first time, people chose to stay anyway, making an uneasy peace with all the water surrounding them. So while Ophelia churned slowly through the Gulf trying to figure out where it wanted to go, people went about their business, working, laughing, and having a good time—but they also had their TVs turned to the Weather Channel and the prognosticators trying to predict how strong the storm would become and where it would go. And they made plans just in case.
“Where do we go first?” Max asked excitedly. “This place is like one huge, awesome party.”
Remy did a double take when he saw the iridescent gold rimming Max’s blue eyes. Damn, the city’s energy was already starting to get to the guy. Not surprising. Max was the youngest guy in SWAT and the newest werewolf in the Pack. He’d gone through his change barely four years ago and was still getting a grip on his inner wolf. Sometimes things slipped out a little.
“Max, your eyes are glowing,” Brooks said, nudging him in the shoulder. “Dial it back a bit, dude.”
Unlike Max, Brooks was completely in control and probably had been from the day he’d become a werewolf. A former fullback at LSU, he was one of the few members of the Pack who could do a full shift to his wolf form without breaking stride or even a sweat. Remy had only been able to completely shift once and that was after Gage and Brooks had spent hours talking him through the process. It had been painful as hell and not something he looked forward to ever doing again.
Muttering a curse, Max closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. A few moments later, he opened them again. “Better?”
Brooks nodded when he saw Max’s eyes were back to their normal color. “Good to go.”
“Sorry about that.” Max ran a hand through his perpetually messy, dark hair. “I’m not sure what the hell that was about. That hasn’t happened to me in months.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Remy laughed, slapping the other werewolf on the shoulder hard enough to break bones in a normal person. “No one is going to notice glowing eyes on Bourbon Street. Hell, down here, I doubt they’d even care if you sprouted fangs. Gage would go apeshit though, so you’d better not. As far as where we go first, it doesn’t matter. You can’t go wrong down here. Let’s start on the left side of the street and stop anywhere that catches our attention.”
“Sounds like we have a plan.” Brooks grinned, his teeth a flash of white against his brown skin. “Let’s have some fun.”
Remy let Zane and Max lead the way as the four of them headed down the sidewalk toward the first club, a blues joint that already had a crowd of people moving in and out of the large, wide-open door. Zane headed to the bar for drinks while Remy and the other guys staked out some standing room space near a support column by the door.
Loud blues music and dancing people filled the club in equal measure, creating a rush of memories that brought a smile to Remy’s face. Damn, it had been a long time since he’d been here. He quickly did the math and realized it had been five years since Gage had found him in a club in the French Quarter doing his very best to drink himself to death.
He was just tugging on that particular memory, relieved that it didn’t bring him as much pain as it used to, when an unusual and extremely tantalizing scent caught his attention. He whipped his head around to stare at the door, sniffing the air. His nose was okay, certainly nothing special like some of the other werewolves in the Pack. It made him wonder why he was picking up this particular smell so clearly.
There were a lot of overwhelming scents down on Bourbon Street. Sweat, booze, perfume, cigarette and cigar smoke, moldy wood, drugs, sex—you name it. All that made it hard to discern anything else around him. This particular scent was different and it demanded his attention.
“Hey, you okay?” Brooks asked.
Brooks was one of his pack mates blessed with a good nose. Remy turned to the big guy and motioned toward the open door.
“Do you smell that?” he asked.
Brooks sniffed. “I smell a lot of things. Which one are you talking about?”
“That flowery, spicy scent coming from outside.”
